The virtual linguist

Millinery

I went to an exhibition of hats by the milliner Stephen Jones at the Victoria and Albert Museum today. The blurb in the exhibition catalogue implies that millinery is not a synonym of hat-making: "Distinct from hat-making, with its large-scale production of standard hat types, millinery focuses on the creation and decoration of elegant, experimental and often whimsical hats."

There were certainly plenty of elegant, experimental and whimsical hats in the exhibition, but dictionary definitions do regard millinery as a synonym of hat-making. Here's the OED definition: "The articles made or sold by milliners", and a milliner is "a person who designs, makes or sells women's hats".

The word milliner refers to the Italian city of Milan; it's an old word for a native or an inhabitant of that city. Milan was seemingly renowned for the fancy goods that were on sale there, and a milliner was originally, according to the OED, "a seller of fancy wares, accessories and articles of (female) apparel, esp. such as were originally made in Milan."

Chambers Gigglossary

I was leafing through a little book, Chambers Gigglossary, in the bookshop today. It is devoted to the humorous definitions that Chambers Dictionary is famous for, plus 'definitions' sent in by members of the public. I've mentioned Chambers' definitions in a previous post, but here are some more:

grammaticaster: a piddling grammarian

lady-killer: a man who is, or fancies himself, irresistible to women

pock-pudding: a Scottish contemptuous name for a mere Englishman

tracksuit: a loose, warm suit intended to be worn by athletes when warming up or training, but sometimes worn by others in an error of judgement

Some of the humorous definitions sent in by readers (and in Gigglossary, but not Chambers Dictionary) are:

bagpipes: an instrument of torture used by the Scots against other nations

colloquialism: a formal word for an informal word

DIY: an abbreviation for Damage-it-yourself

instruction manual: an explanation of how to use something written in a way that is easily understood only by the author

monosyllable: a contradiction in terms

oxymoron: a stupid cow

paranoia: why do you want to know?

recursive: see recursive

teacher: a person who talks to himself for a living

There are more examples here on Chambers' website. You can submit your own humorous definitions too.

Sam Hill and other euphemisms for hell

I've been reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird this week, and I noticed the expression Sam Hill used once or twice as a euphemism for 'hell', as in the sentence, for example: "But what in the sam holy hill did you wait till tonight?" (sic, chapter 6).

The Oxford English Dictionary says the origin of this phrase is unknown but dates it back to the early 19th century. Michael Quinion of World Wide Words says the expression has its origin in Guilford, Connecticut, but no-one can trace the particular Sam Hill referred to. Some say Samuel Hill was a perennially unsuccessful political candidate so the phrase 'to run like Sam Hill' meant to get nowhere. Others cite another Sam Hill, this time a successful politician who held office for many years and thus the phrase 'Give 'em Sam Hill' was heard on numerous occasions. Wikipedia has a few more suggestions as to who the real Sam Hill might have been.

The fact that Hill sounds so similar to hell is clearly one of the reasons for the euphemism. There is an older phrase, to go to Halifax, where Halifax is also a euphemism for hell. It is the English town of Halifax meant here, as there is a similar phrase from hell, Hull and Halifax (often followed by 'Good Lord, deliver us'), Hull and Halifax being Yorkshire towns. These lines come from the poem, or prayer, known as the Beggar's Litany, written by the 17th-century poet John Taylor. The full text of the poem is given here. Hull and the first syllable of Halifax may sound like the word hell, but that is not the reason those towns are mentioned in the expression. The vagrancy laws in Hull at the time were so stringent that beggars would find themselves quickly clapped into jail. It was even worse in Halifax, which had its Halifax Gibbet Law, the gibbet being a guillotine. Anyone believed guilty of stealing more than thirteen and a half pence was beheaded; the prisoner's guilt or innocence was ascertained after the execution!

Go to Hanover was a euphemism for go to hell in the 18th century (there were Hanoverian monarchs in this century). Hoboken, in New Jersey, is a 20th-century American euphemism for hell.

Nocebo

The word placebo is fairly common - a substance believed by the patient to be therapeutic, when really it contains no therapeutic ingredients at all. The word nocebo is also used in medicine to describe a substance which, like a placebo, contains no therapeutic ingredients, but unlike a placebo, actually causes harm to the patient. Part of the OED's definition of nocebo effect is "adverse effects reported after administration of a placebo".

This fascinating article from the New Scientist looks at the nocebo effect in some detail and compares it to a witchdoctor's curse -- the patient is given what she or he thinks is a therapeutic drug, but actually it's a dummy or placebo. However, the patient believes it to be a genuine drug and might therefore experience all the negative and unpleasant side-effects of the actual drug. Believing you are ill, or going to suffer, it seems, can actually make you ill, or suffer - which is how the witchdoctor's curse works.

Placebo is the 'I' form of the future tense of the Latin verb placere, to please (placebo = I will please). Nocebo is the 'I' form of the future tense of the Latin verb nocere, to harm, so nocebo means 'I will cause harm'. Nocebo was coined only in the 1960s. Placebo in the medical sense has been around since the 18th century. The OED has a much earlier citation containing the word placebo (c1230) but at this time a placebo was a prayer for the dead.

Yogurt or yoghurt?

A letter in the food industry's journal The Grocer has caused great debate (see this Daily Telegraph article). Food retailers are divided as to whether the correct spelling is yoghurt or yogurt. Yogurt is certainly the more popular spelling as far as dictionaries and brands are concerned (I've just peeked in my fridge and I've a pot of Sainsbury's yogurt - without the h). Some retailers, however, feel that other manufacturers and retailers have adopted the americanised spelling (yogurt) without good reason.

The word yogurt/yoghurt comes from Turkish. The Turkish word contains a g with a breve on top(ğ) and this was traditionally rendered into English as gh, hence the traditionalists' concern. The word aga, meaning Eastern military chief, is also from Turkish, and the OED, but not smaller dictionaries, give the variant agha. The h has been dropped from that word almost everywhere now, and the same thing is currently happening to the word yoghurt.

Things are more complicated than the current argument suggests. The OED gives a number of variant spellings of yogurt (which is its headword): yoghurd, yogourt, yahourt, yaghourt, yogurd, yoghourt, yooghort, yughard, yughurt, yohourth plus yoghurt, and it also has a separate entry yaourt with the variant spellings yaoort and youart.

In to or into; maybe or may be?

A reader pulled me up on a sentence I had written in a recent post - "I called into my local library", which should have read "I called in to my local library" (thanks, Tim). Into is a preposition and usually indicates movement or direction. Some of the examples in the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English are: put it into the fridge, he walked into a trap, he crashed into a parked car, the road which led down into the village, the wind blowing into your face. Because into is a preposition it is always followed by a noun. In can also be a preposition, but it has a wider usage than into. It can be an adverb (we were locked in) or can form part of a phrasal verb (give in etc). In these cases, if in is followed by to, the two little words do not run together to form into: he gave in to the pressure (not into).

Into can often be used instead of in to; it's much easier to explain the difference between maybe and may be. May is a verb, whereas maybe is an adverb and so there will always be another verb somewhere in the sentence: "that may be true" but "that could maybe be the truth" (a bit clumsy but perfectly grammatical). One way of ensuring you've got the right form is to ask yourself if you can replace maybe/may be with perhaps. If you can, you need to write maybe as one word ("that could perhaps be the truth" is ok, but "that perhaps true" isn't).

Whitsun

In the UK, Parliament closed last Thursday for the Whitsun recess, but, strictly speaking, today is not Whit Sunday. Whit Sunday is a movable holiday; it is the seventh Sunday after Easter (which means next Sunday, 31 May, this year). It is a religious festival and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Pentecost is another word for Whitsun or Whit Sunday and derives from the Greek, meaning fiftieth day - the seven weeks after Easter.

Whit Sunday means white Sunday in Old English and Old Norse. The word white probably refers to the custom of the newly baptised wearing white baptismal robes. Whitsun was always a jolly festival - it was probably seen as the start of summer - and people traditionally wore new clothes and took part in all sorts of merrymaking. Morris dancing is associated with this period, as is the custom of well-dressing (ie the decorating of wells) in some areas.

The Whitsun holiday was replaced in the early 1970s by the fixed Spring Bank Holiday - always the last Monday in May.

Isabella

I went to the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park earlier. This section of the park appears not to have been named after a woman called Isabella. Isabella is in the Oxford English Dictionary and means "Greyish yellow; light buff". Richmond Park's website says that this is because the soil is yellowish in colour.

In the 17th century this area of the park was called the Sleyt and by the late 18th century it was called the Isabella Slade. The OED says that the word slade differs in meaning around the country and defines it as "A valley, dell or dingle; an open space between banks or woods; a forest glade; a strip of greensward or of boggy land". There is, in fact, a Bog Garden in Isabella's Plantation.

Meat-drink-washing-and-lodging and other words for gin

I came across the word meat-drink-washing-and-lodging today; it's an old slang word for gin. The word suggests that gin provides everything you could possibly want!

Gin became popular in England after William of Orange ascended the throne in 1689. It was originally a Dutch drink. Another name for gin is geneva, not anything to do with the Swiss town, but a contraction and anglicisation of the French genévrier, meaning juniper, the berry that is used to flavour gin. Gin was cheap and therefore popular with the poor. Hogarth's picture Gin Lane shows the sorry state the widespread availability of cheap gin brought about.

The nicknames for gin - and there are lots of them - speak volumes too. Here's a selection of synonyms for gin which have been in use over the past three hundred years: bunter's tea, south sea, cock-my-cap, wind, kill-grief, comfort, white tape, white satin, white wool, white ribbon, bit of tape, blue tape, blue ribbon, light blue, sky blue, poverty, apricock-water, diddle, kill-cobbler, stark-naked, strip-me-naked, mother's ruin, roll-me-in-the-kennel and the Cockney rhyming slang needle and pin, nose and chin and Vera Lynn.

Dumbing down

I called into my local library today for the first time since it recently reopened after a major refurbishment. Apart from a new lick of paint, some of the shelves had been renamed. What used to be the fiction shelves were now labelled Novels, and the biography section had been relabelled Lives.

Something similar has happened to the courses on offer at the local adult education centre. For donkey's years there have been classes in dressmaking, but now they are called Clothes-making.

Does the council think that people no longer understand the words fiction, biography and dressmaking? I call the name-change dumbing down.